Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Winner Of The Week: Do816

Kansas City struck organic search gold last week with their Flyover 2018 event page and ticket giveaway, earning their 4th highest week of site traffic ever.

The event page recorded 2,123 page views last week from organic search (95% of the overall traffic) and is well on its way to being Do816's most successful page -- outside of the homepage. The ticket giveaway has also received the most entries and new users of Do816's giveaways by a large margin, seeing 821 entries (627 of which were new users) so far, with over a month to go before the winner is selected.

We talk frequently about the importance of capitalizing on organic search for event pages for big, new events and the boost it can add to your site traffic. But the real takeaway here is the value of having as many ticket giveaways or RSVPs on those pages as possible, as early as possible, to turn that organic search traffic into new users. These new events that people in your town are likely to be searching -- big concerts, street fairs, music or food festivals, etc. -- create huge opportunity for user growth when coupled with ticket giveaways.

Winner Of The Week: Do503

Our friends in Portland are aiming high for their goals in 2018, with a big focus on growing their email list/user base. The Do503 team, knowing that giveaways are one of the largest contributors to that growth, put together a super rad Valentine's Day contest that resulted in one best weeks ever for the metro.

The giveaway, which had a total of 2,186 entries (872 of which were new users), resulted in a huge boost for email, site traffic and new registered users.

Big Wins:

1,264 new registered users (most new registered users ever)

2,325 unique email clicks (highest unique email clicks ever)

21.74% email CTR (highest email click-through-rate ever)

10,695 unique email opens (9th most unique email opens)

8,163 site visits (4th highest week of site traffic)

4,693 new site visitors (9th most new site visitors)

Jason from Do503 noted that having "something for everyone" was one of the keys of this campaign's success, and when it came to prizes, made sure there was as "dynamic a mix as possible for the prizes, to appeal to our current audience/demo, as well as to pull in some one's we don't have as many of."

The campaign ran smoothly in large part to "...having a set plan to launch at the same time with all [of our] partners and to check in mid-way through the 'campaign' to ensure everyone [was] firing on all cylinders/pushing it."

What did they learn from the campaign? "In the future we aim to launch our next contest/giveaway even sooner so it has a longer shelf-life, as well as aim to continue to grow our distribution size. Between giveaways our total entries went up 104.1%, new users grew 113.2%, and referrals went up 177.7%. The winner (of both) gave us hella shout-outs on social and left 5-star reviews on our Facebook. The goal is to roll back down to Summit this year with some major growth."

Honorable Mentions

Do503 wasn't the only metro to capitalize on a rad giveaway last week. Here's a few other metros that did an awesome job:

DoSD: San Diego Music Awards

This /p/ page earned a total of 9.6k pageviews last week, which helped attribute to o DoSD's highest week of site traffic and new vistors EVER.

These stellar numbers also puts it well on pace to match last year's performance of 24.2k pageviews.

Of these 9.6k pageviews, 50% have come from Facebook referral traffic.

In terms of overall traffic, this is nearly a 20% increase in referral traffic from the 2017 program, one week in.

While the San Diego Music Awards Facebook has been linking to the DoSD /p/ page several times a week, a majority of this traffic has been coming from artists and friends of artists sharing the page.

The /p/ page has already seen a 300% increase in organic traffic versus last year.

The contest has already seen 4,969 entries.

Takeaways & Replicable Actions

With Facebook's recent News Feed update, there hasn't been a better time to focus on shareable content in the platform.

By incentivizing artists and their friends/family to share and comment on these posts, DoSD has curated an invaluable source of referral traffic.

By reusing the same page/URL from last year to host the award voting, DoSD has well positioned themselves to see a significant momentum shift in organic search traffic from users searching the event in Google.

DoSD's GM, Marjy Taylor, said the most likely culprit for the performance of the program so far, was likely that their email list has grown 5x since they ran the contest last year.

DoTheBay: Play Noise Pop Fest

Big Wins

This /p/ page earned a total of 16.7k pageviews last week (up 44% from last year's page).

This puts it well on pace to match last year's performance of 28.5k pageviews.

This attributed to DoTheBay's 2nd highest week of site traffic and 5th highest new visitor count EVER.

The same contest recorded 7,350 pageviews in 2017.

DoTheBay saw similar success as DoSD with Facebook referrals making up about 35% of this site traffic.

DoTheBay excelled in bringing referral traffic from other sources like Instagram and Twitter, which earned 15% and 4% of overall traffic, respectively.

The contest saw 4,428 entries total.

Takeaways & Replicable Actions

While the same takeaways can be had in regards to Facebook referral traffic as DoSD, DoTheBay excelled at bringing in referrals from all social media channels.

This traffic diversification helped attribute to the increased participation of this contest versus last year.

Some more takeaways and issues with the contest from DoTheBay's GM, Brett Leader:

"This is the third time we've ran one of these contests, each time getting more artist submissions:

This was also the first time we've offered 2 spots to winners, instead of just one. "

Minor Issues:

"We still had some minor issues with users not being able successfully submit votes, but much less than in the previous 2 contests. I think it would be interesting to turn this into a 2 month campaign and have 1 month just for artist submissions, followed by 1 month of just user voting."

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Winner Of The Week: Do816

Kansas City struck organic search gold last week with their Flyover 2018 event page and ticket giveaway, earning their 4th highest week of site traffic ever.

The event page recorded 2,123 page views last week from organic search (95% of the overall traffic) and is well on its way to being Do816's most successful page -- outside of the homepage. The ticket giveaway has also received the most entries and new users of Do816's giveaways by a large margin, seeing 821 entries (627 of which were new users) so far, with over a month to go before the winner is selected.

We talk frequently about the importance of capitalizing on organic search for event pages for big, new events and the boost it can add to your site traffic. But the real takeaway here is the value of having as many ticket giveaways or RSVPs on those pages as possible, as early as possible, to turn that organic search traffic into new users. These new events that people in your town are likely to be searching -- big concerts, street fairs, music or food festivals, etc. -- create huge opportunity for user growth when coupled with ticket giveaways.

Winner Of The Week: Do503

Our friends in Portland are aiming high for their goals in 2018, with a big focus on growing their email list/user base. The Do503 team, knowing that giveaways are one of the largest contributors to that growth, put together a super rad Valentine's Day contest that resulted in one best weeks ever for the metro.

The giveaway, which had a total of 2,186 entries (872 of which were new users), resulted in a huge boost for email, site traffic and new registered users.

Big Wins:

1,264 new registered users (most new registered users ever)

2,325 unique email clicks (highest unique email clicks ever)

21.74% email CTR (highest email click-through-rate ever)

10,695 unique email opens (9th most unique email opens)

8,163 site visits (4th highest week of site traffic)

4,693 new site visitors (9th most new site visitors)

Jason from Do503 noted that having "something for everyone" was one of the keys of this campaign's success, and when it came to prizes, made sure there was as "dynamic a mix as possible for the prizes, to appeal to our current audience/demo, as well as to pull in some one's we don't have as many of."

The campaign ran smoothly in large part to "...having a set plan to launch at the same time with all [of our] partners and to check in mid-way through the 'campaign' to ensure everyone [was] firing on all cylinders/pushing it."

What did they learn from the campaign? "In the future we aim to launch our next contest/giveaway even sooner so it has a longer shelf-life, as well as aim to continue to grow our distribution size. Between giveaways our total entries went up 104.1%, new users grew 113.2%, and referrals went up 177.7%. The winner (of both) gave us hella shout-outs on social and left 5-star reviews on our Facebook. The goal is to roll back down to Summit this year with some major growth."

Honorable Mentions

Do503 wasn't the only metro to capitalize on a rad giveaway last week. Here's a few other metros that did an awesome job:

DoSD: San Diego Music Awards

This /p/ page earned a total of 9.6k pageviews last week, which helped attribute to o DoSD's highest week of site traffic and new vistors EVER.

These stellar numbers also puts it well on pace to match last year's performance of 24.2k pageviews.

Of these 9.6k pageviews, 50% have come from Facebook referral traffic.

In terms of overall traffic, this is nearly a 20% increase in referral traffic from the 2017 program, one week in.

While the San Diego Music Awards Facebook has been linking to the DoSD /p/ page several times a week, a majority of this traffic has been coming from artists and friends of artists sharing the page.

The /p/ page has already seen a 300% increase in organic traffic versus last year.

The contest has already seen 4,969 entries.

Takeaways & Replicable Actions

With Facebook's recent News Feed update, there hasn't been a better time to focus on shareable content in the platform.

By incentivizing artists and their friends/family to share and comment on these posts, DoSD has curated an invaluable source of referral traffic.

By reusing the same page/URL from last year to host the award voting, DoSD has well positioned themselves to see a significant momentum shift in organic search traffic from users searching the event in Google.

DoSD's GM, Marjy Taylor, said the most likely culprit for the performance of the program so far, was likely that their email list has grown 5x since they ran the contest last year.

DoTheBay: Play Noise Pop Fest

Big Wins

This /p/ page earned a total of 16.7k pageviews last week (up 44% from last year's page).

This puts it well on pace to match last year's performance of 28.5k pageviews.

This attributed to DoTheBay's 2nd highest week of site traffic and 5th highest new visitor count EVER.

The same contest recorded 7,350 pageviews in 2017.

DoTheBay saw similar success as DoSD with Facebook referrals making up about 35% of this site traffic.

DoTheBay excelled in bringing referral traffic from other sources like Instagram and Twitter, which earned 15% and 4% of overall traffic, respectively.

The contest saw 4,428 entries total.

Takeaways & Replicable Actions

While the same takeaways can be had in regards to Facebook referral traffic as DoSD, DoTheBay excelled at bringing in referrals from all social media channels.

This traffic diversification helped attribute to the increased participation of this contest versus last year.

Some more takeaways and issues with the contest from DoTheBay's GM, Brett Leader:

"This is the third time we've ran one of these contests, each time getting more artist submissions:

This was also the first time we've offered 2 spots to winners, instead of just one. "

Minor Issues:

"We still had some minor issues with users not being able successfully submit votes, but much less than in the previous 2 contests. I think it would be interesting to turn this into a 2 month campaign and have 1 month just for artist submissions, followed by 1 month of just user voting."